


The Long Way Out

by sanerontheinside



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Imperial Years, M/M, Otherwhen timeline, Post-Order 66, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Re-entry Universe - Flamethrower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:27:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9940997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanerontheinside/pseuds/sanerontheinside
Summary: Twelve years behind enemy lines.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flamethrower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flamethrower/gifts).



> _“What are your names?”_  
>  _“RC-1186, Captain of the Theta Squad—”_  
>  _“Names, Captain, not designations,” she shook her head._  
>  _“Captain Sly,” he said at last._  
>  _“RC-1291. Clip.”_  
>  _Lia tipped her head at him. “Clip?”_  
>  _“I tend to fly a little too close to things.” he said. “Clipped a vulture droid in midflight, sent it off course into a cliff wall.”_  
>  _Lia smiled. “Watch yourself, you can clip all the droids you want, but not at your expense.” She nodded at the next man._  
>  _“RC-1227, Laser. I can rig laser traps and trip wires like you’ve never seen.”_  
>  _The General grinned, positively manic. “I’ll never see them, huh? Nice.”_  
>  _“RC-1159, Slice.”_  
>  _“Codes like a devil,” Clip supplied. Slice nodded._  
>  _“RC-1344, Raptor. I’m your pilot.”_  
>  _“RC-1398, Flare, explosives expert—”_  
>  _“Explosives_ nut, _” Laser put in._

Laser was the first to realise something was wrong. It was there when the Order came— _wrong—_ and it was there when Liura started to fight back— _wrong—_ and it was there when the brothers chased after her— _wrong!—_ and it was still there as he fell to one knee and let his arms drop, useless. For the first time in his life he was unable to take the shot. The others didn’t pay him any mind. It was there as they boarded the ship and left, but the moment they left the atmosphere the overwhelming clamour in his head gave way to _WRONG WRONG WRONG—_

Laser was also the first to snap out of it. His chip stuttered and died before anyone else’s, leaving sudden silence that was empty and yet full of howling desolation and horror. It felt unreal. It felt, bizarrely, like waking up.

When his chip broke down, he woke up to standing between Raptor, who was still flying like a maniac, and Slice on the other side. Gods knew what had happened to Commander Sly and Clip, but he was pretty sure they’d left them on that swamp of a planet with their General, however long ago that was. Flare had been reassigned to some other division in the Imperial Forces. How the three of them had managed to stay together, Laser didn’t understand at all. His knees shook, his head pulsed angrily, and he quickly withdrew to the shuttle’s small hold.

They had just wiped out another Rebel hideout. Laser sat, shaking like his bones could come apart, blaster across his lap. He'd woken up out of one nightmare and into another, mostly just the same one. Would it feel like waking up, he wondered, if he picked that blaster up and turned it—? Or would it just be an empty void?

He’d asked the General about that once: about what comes after death. She’d given him a long, odd look, and tears pooled in her eyes before she caught herself and broke her gaze. But then she spoke, at least.

“The Jedi Code says, ‘There is no death, there is only the Force,’” she said tonelessly, then smiled and looked up again. “They taught us that when we die, we become ‘one with the Force’. No one really ever tells you what it means, because none of them know.”

The smile was paper-thin, the look of her skin was more ashen than he’d ever seen it, but she reached out across the mess hall table and offered her hands, palms up. Hesitating for an instant, he’d taken hold of the two dry, soft hands, and was instantly pulled under a wave of velvet darkness. It wrapped around him, warm and comforting, nudging him gently into letting go of his worries and just floating along in the dark.

With a gasp, he realised it wasn’t so dark after all. There were lights all around him, like stars in the night sky. All of them slightly different, lending their heat to the darkness. In front of him, a single light burnt strongly but did not overpower. He could trace connections from it to five other beings, and to himself.

Laser opened his eyes and unabashedly stared at his Jedi, finding her smiling a little more warmly this time. “We are all one with the Force already, Laser. Whatever happens next—I suppose no one knows until they get there. But it’s nice to think that at least in the manner of how we go on, we have a choice.”

“We go on after this, you think?”

“Well, not if you don’t want to, I’d guess,” she shrugged. “But I do think…” Her eyes drifted down to their joined hands, her head tilting contemplatively to the side. “When you dream of the dead, sometimes they come to you.”

“I thought you said Jedi don’t dream,” he said, couching the doubt he’d always held in intonation alone.

Liura graced him with a rough chuckle. “Aside from nasty predictions of the future, when I was a child, I didn’t dream but once or twice in a year. Often, I find myself awake with a scream in my throat and no memory of what put it there. But once, I dreamed that someone I missed terribly had come for me, that he was going to walk me out of the hell I’d ended up in. I walked out of there alone, fought for every inch of it. But I could never have done it on my own.”

There it was again, that Look that was purely Jedi, the one that could see right through you and nothing could be hidden from it. But Laser had nothing to hide.

“I miss him too,” Liura admitted softly.

Staring down at his blaster, Laser missed both of them more than ever. Flare, who, it turned out, had been alive all that time and who’d somehow gone from Seppie prisoner to Imperial trooper, and his damn General. Finding Flare alive had been the one bright moment in this chip-addled mess, and neither of them had even had the time to trade more than a clasp of the arm—so much, and so little. Flare was in command of his own squad, and seemed to be doing about as well as could be expected.

Then again, he thought, what would happen to Raptor and Slice, if he left them? When would their chips give out? When would they be struck with that same urge to fit a blaster between their teeth and pull the trigger? Fuck, no. He’d lost enough brothers to this shit already. He wasn’t going to leave them.

Slice poked his head in to check on him. “Hey, vod? You okay?”

No. Not even close, but neither were they, and Laser wasn’t sure they knew just how far from it they were. That only cemented his resolve to stay with them. So he flashed him a tired smile and gave the barest of nods, and Slice took that as enough of an answer.

Laser was known for never missing a shot. Now, he didn’t bother with accuracy anymore. He pulled a little to the left, he shot shoulders and legs, aiming to incapacitate rather than kill. He couldn’t count the times he’d almost died, simply because he didn’t kill a Rebel. Slice and Raptor had the grace not to notice, or at least to act like it.

Year Four was a special kind of hell, full of far too many scrapes with death and suddenly a very sharp realisation of how little the Empire cared for its men. Not like they hadn’t known, but with time the reality of it had become so much more oppressive. That year, they’d been sent out with other squads a great deal, but few of those soldiers had any training even remotely resembling Liura Shar’ii’s ARCs. It kept the three of them alive while they watched others die.

One night, Laser found Slice with his blaster for company and a bottle of something lethally alcoholic. Slice never could get properly drunk—only sick—but apparently he hadn’t given up trying. Laser tried to pull the weapon out of his reach, succeeded mostly in angering his _vod_ , and then got the beating of his life. Slice moved like a man stone sober and delivered blows with the force of a tank. Laser, in an inspired, last-ditch attempt to slow his brother down, cracked him over the head with one full bottle. He’d already had three.

The next day, Slice had woken up with a ringing headache and nausea the likes of which he’d never known. But he didn’t reach for the blaster again.

Raptor’s turn to be talked off the edge came about a year later, and was a bit more daunting. He’d always flown like a madman, being the only pilot—perhaps the only mere mortal alive—who could give Skywalker a run for his money. It was hard to tell between the times when he was crazy but trying to survive and the times he was honest-to-gods trying to crash the fighter. Laser and Slice knew well enough that Raptor wouldn’t dare try it so long as they were in the shuttle with him. It was impossible to say what he’d do on his own in a fighter, or shooting at Rebels on some planet surface. So they always kept a comm line open, kept him talking, reminding him that he wasn’t alone and they weren’t going to leave him.

Slice had always been the best slicer of their batch—it earned him his name before anyone had ever seen him wield a vibroblade. But Slice’s talents had gone overlooked by the Imps, so that when he arranged a complicated string of orders and recalls and checks and rechecks designed to get two completely unrelated squads in the same location and stage a crossfire, no one even tried to get to the bottom of that tangle. Laser got the ident for Flare’s squad, most of them also clones, and got them a warning message. They’d had over a year’s worth of time to plan it.

But, fuck all, who ever imagined they’d be taking pages out of Pong Krell’s book?

At the very last moment, though, Laser turned around and went back to the SD. He couldn’t have said why for all the world, except that suddenly a crippling wave of doubt overtook him. Looking over at the other team, searching for one person, one specific set of movements that he would know anywhere in the world, a sudden emptiness yawned wide in his chest. Flare wasn’t among them.

Suddenly it was even easier to imagine that the commander of the other squad had never been Flare at all. Laser hadn’t seen his face or heard his voice, not in years. Easy to believe that Flare was a long time dead, and all that really mattered was that Laser got Raptor and Slice, and maybe five other brothers, out of this perpetual hell.

He was going back to get more.

They’d learned a great deal from their General—all her commandos. Sly turned out to be a remarkably competent medic, much to everyone’s ceaseless amazement (and mild horror, because who wants to think about their Commander potentially sawing off a leg?). Raptor, usually the least talkative of them all, had picked up some six languages besides Basic and Mando’a at the last count. Flare, who’d always been fond of anything that went boom, apparently learned how to improvise explosive chemical cocktails as well. Clip, bizarrely, ended up being the one they looked to for his intricate and somehow infallible escape plans. Slice had learned to look right through political posturing with uncanny acuity.

Laser, however, had picked up a much more subtle skill from his General. He learned to watch people, to read them for the signs that set them apart from their surroundings. The way Liura could pick out a Seppie in a crowd who wanted badly to defect, the way she could read the cold grip of hopelessness and the certainty that there was no way out - Laser could pick out those very same things. And just like his General, he learned to talk to those people, offer them hope and a promise of tomorrow.

Over the period of about a year, he turned all of his General’s favourite tricks to his advantage, and had set up a system in place for letting brothers defect safely. And over that time, he heard so many stories, saw so many things. He saw those who never realised there was a way out. He saw men who couldn’t face the outside world in their despair and stayed in the Imperial army. He saw men who dared to pass information back to the Alliance, and quietly did everything to watch their backs. He couldn’t bring himself to leave, but somehow he made something good of it.

Laser never missed his target. When Sixty-Six crashed down on their heads, he’d sunk to his knees and dropped his rifle from nerveless fingers. What happened to Sly and Clip, he did not know, except that he thought Clip had collapsed, blood running from his nose. Commander Sly struggled for a little while, then ran after their fleeing General with the others. Laser had never dared to ask Raptor or Slice what had happened. He had the oddest feeling, though, that when their General saw Clip fall and convulse, she stopped caring about her own survival. Clip would never have raised a hand against her, not in any state. He’d been fighting it, and the damn thing was killing him.

Why couldn’t they all have been brave enough to do what he had done? It would have killed them outright, and they would never have to see this world. This world in which the Jedi were traitors, the Jedi were no more, and the people were all cracked and broken.

Laser couldn’t be certain, but he thought he remembered her begging them not to fight it. Begging them to let her risk her life for them. Just this once, to let her take the shot. The thought—the _memory—_ surprised him so much one day that he had to sit down on the nearest crate and breathe through it.

_Fuck. Crazy kriffing Jedi. Fuckdammit, General, how in the hells could you ask us for that?_

But at least, he thought, now he knew there was no way she could have survived.

Never, not in any nightmare, not in the very worst moments of the Imperial Years, had Laser ever imagined he might get the order to shoot his General a second time. And that was what made it real: his Jedi, standing meters away on barren ground outlined in harsh starlight, staring back at him with an unreadable expression. He froze, then, consequences be damned. He fully expected to die, one way or another, since he could see she was not unarmed and he wouldn’t put it past the commanding officer to turn his rifle on his own troopers.

No order came, no noise of blasterfire. Laser realised that he was alone, standing dead still and staring at his Jedi, gun pointed down at the ground. “Come and find me,” he thought he heard her say, and then she was gone.

Fuck, he didn’t know _how._ Although, perhaps, he could at least start with his own system, and get the hells out of the Imperial army. 

Less than a tenday later he found himself in a bar where he was supposed to meet a contact who could bring him in. The moment he saw her: unmistakeable even now, General Ankiel Larom, Liura’s former Padawan. Laser sketched the appointed signal, hand out, palm open, then closed it into a heavy fist and started one hell of a brawl. Seconds before the rioting bunch started in on peaceful patrons squeezed nervously against the walls, Larom appeared at his elbow and quickly ushered him out.

Larom brought him to a medical facility, where his chip was removed. From there, she took him to some other place, to see other officers, answer inane questions. Since the moment he’d seen his General, he never wanted to risk catching her in his sights again. But he hadn’t just left the Empire behind: he’d left a purpose behind, and who knew how many brothers still? He was grateful to General Ankiel, of course he was, but all of this was empty effort, really.

He wanted to turn to Larom sometimes, to ask her where the others were. If only he weren’t so afraid of hearing the answer, perhaps he might have. Were Raptor and Slice safe? Did they make it out? Of course they did, he knew that. Did they make it to the Alliance? Was his General really, truly still alive?

Or was she just another one of those ghosts who came to him in his dreams, and whispered words of forgiveness he wouldn’t let himself believe?

One night he dreamed of a desert, sky a jewel blue and sand a pale colour. A rather boring looking one, honestly. Not like Liura’s favourite desert, the one where the river had carved out a canyon in walls of beautiful blue-greys and greens, and the sands sparkled silver in moonlight. He jolted awake, wondering what startled him, and found he had company: someone was leaning casually against his doorframe like it was the most natural thing in the world, watching him sleep.

He stared at the intruder for a moment, unable to make out his face in the morning light. “Excuse me,” he dared, and was cut off by a very angry tirade with a generous smattering of curses in Mando’a. He couldn’t help the half-smile that crept onto his face as he heaved himself up from the bed and stood. It was good to hear that again. It was something that sounded familiar, a language he hadn’t heard enough of in the last few years. He let the sound of it convince him he really had found a way out, he was finally free.

And then he was being pressed back against the wall by the weight and warmth of a body he knew as well as his own.

“What the fuck, Laser? Why didn’t you leave with them? You planned it all out, and then you fucking went back to hell!”

 _Oh, fuck._ Laser couldn’t breathe. “Flare?” he whispered, still in disbelief.

A strangled sound, suspiciously like a sob, was his answer, and a more believable confirmation than he’d dared to imagine he might ever get. And then he found himself wrapped in a crushing, bruising bearhug, dragged down to the floor and simply held, for an unknown period of time.

Time didn’t matter anymore, after that. He had Flare, and Slice, and Raptor. Even General Ankiel didn’t seem to care for time much, and didn’t have too many tasks to assign to them. Slice ended up teaching, mostly. Raptor turned out a pack of pilot aces. They ran a few more ops, each one strangely a bitter reminder of the times they got separated from their General, whether by accident or by design. It was strange to walk away from a job well done and not meet her with Sly and Clip on the other side, glowing with pride at their success, or dragging exhausted but glad to have survived.

That was the truly maddening part. The feeling of being at loose ends, no matter what they did, brought with it the suspicion that they were no longer needed. It made sense, of course. They were made for war and the war was long over. The only real difference between the Rebels and the Imps was that the Empire didn’t give a damn whether you lived or died, but here at least there were old friends who should have understood. General Ankiel had never quite been like Laser’s General. She’d been less open, she’d worked on her own—never with the clones. She never quite been one of them, Laser thought.

Finally, Larom came to them with—not orders, exactly. She’d never been one for ordering people around. It was a request for them to accompany her to a different base, to meet someone who apparently had information on Imperial weapons. For the last few nights, Laser had woken up from dreams of the desert more and more often, and the image flashed before him again as Larom spoke. He came back from the vision to find Flare looking at him like he’d follow Laser to the edge of Wild Space. Raptor and Slice were watching, expectant, as if he had the right to decide for the four of them. Ah, what the hells. It was better than doing nothing, anyway.

Larom offered them an odd little smile, like she’d just won some game only she knew she’d been playing. Kriffing Jedi.

If he’d known where this was going, Laser wouldn’t have shrugged it off. If he had any idea that he would see Clip hunched over a datapad and tapping out a report, joking and laughing through it; if he’d known that he would see Commander Sly glowering and hovering protectively over a chair across from Clip; if he’d even imagined that the person sitting in that chair would turn and flash a brilliant, warm, welcoming smile—

He probably would have tried to hide away again. Fuck, he didn’t deserve that welcome—not any of it. Liura’s smile gave way to worry, and shakily the General rose from her seat. Too thin, too feverish for his liking, she walked up to him with small, almost-unsteady steps.

“None of that now,” the familiar voice whispered softly as she reached out and grasped his arm. “Please, Laser. Raptor, Slice—all of you, you’re broadcasting so loud you may as well be shouting.”

It was Slice who managed, at last, in a gravelly voice, to put into words what Laser could not. “We were supposed to have your back, General. Godsdammit, we should have known—”

 _Known that something was wrong._ The thought hung between them in the air, unspoken because Liura cut him off with a glance, but Laser shuddered. He’d never quite let on when his chip had broken, or that it had probably been defective from the start. He’d never been able to take the shot—a fact which Raptor and Slice didn’t remember. But Laser hadn’t stopped them either, and he still held on to the guilt for that.

His General’s voice was still soft, but somehow breaking. “You found yourselves in a situation where you had no choice, because all your choices were taken from you. And somehow you managed to make one anyway.”

Raptor tried to argue that they shot at her, but she raised a hand before he could get a word in edgewise.

“I ran, and you didn’t bother looking too hard, I must say. If you’d really been motivated, I don’t think I would have stood a chance. None of you failed me,” their General said firmly. “Not a single one of you. You came back alive, and that’s all I ever asked of you.”

“You shouldn’t have asked us to stop fighting it,” Laser said at last. “And you shouldn’t have been the one to give your life for us. You gave us an _order_ to let you run,” _and it still stings._

Behind her, Clip looked up with a ghost of a smile on his face. “Yeah, well. I just assumed our General was trying to set a new record for stupid, so I ignored it.”

Laser snorted. That did sound an awful lot like Clip. He seriously couldn’t think of another trooper who would ever disregard an order, survive, and actually figure out a way to save everyone’s asses for that matter.

The corner of Liura’s mouth twitched, and her eyes sparkled suspiciously. She reached up her hand to the network of scars that crisscrossed over all of Laser’s head. “Not that it changed your mind. You look like you kept paying for it. How many times did you walk into the wrong end of a blaster?”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw—and Laser heard—Raptor and Slice jerk back like they’d touched a live wire, staring at their vod as if they were seeing him properly for the first time. Flare and Sly swore.

And Laser was slowly, quietly losing it under the small, dry, all-too-warm hand. Supreme irony, after all, had always been his style. Laser never missed his target, but the moment he stepped up to become one, nobody managed to hit him, certainly not for lack of trying. The war ended, and he’d gone from charmed to cursed.

“Didn’t take,” he rasped, as his General pulled him into a desperate embrace, and he was sure that shine in her eyes had gone well past her control and spilled over into tears.

Just barely able to see over his shoulder, Liura looked pleadingly at Slice and Flare, and Raptor, who stood at a less favourable angle. She reached for them, one free hand grasping at empty air until they got the hint. Behind her, Sly shook off his stupor and slid a powerful hand around Raptor’s neck to draw him in closer. Clip shuffled around last.

They were all seven again, none of them quite the same as they had been. Clip had tremors in his hands and Flare wouldn’t let Laser out of his sight. Raptor went back to training his pilot aces—who adored him to bits. Slice spent most of his time with Larom, who, it turned out, was now the Master of Feeding Disinformation to the Enemy—a worthy successor to Master Liura if ever there was one. Sly watched all of them, every inch protective, but never more so than when he hovered over the General. Liura refused her rank—which wasn’t altogether surprising. But Sly was the only one to take it to heart, anyway. To the rest of them, she would always be their General.

On some nights, Laser and Flare would venture out to stare at the night sky. Whenever the others joined them—particularly Raptor—they could expect history lessons on neighbouring planets, their cultures, quirks of the languages or dialects spoken there, odd trivia about the climate. But Laser loved the nights when it was just the two of them. It was a quiet planet, grassy, forested, with a lake near the base. Flare usually dropped off to sleep first, lulled by the cool night breeze. It helped with the nightmares, too—to be outside, unconfined.

On one of these peaceful nights, with both the Empire and the war seemingly nonexistent, m Laser sat with Flare’s head in his lap, listening to his quiet, even breathing. He heard the soft brush of bare feet approaching. “General,” he greeted the Jedi softly, without even needing to turn. She settled down beside him with a mild scowl, but didn’t correct him. For a long moment she sat still, as if meditating. Laser was sure she was waiting for something.

“Nightmares?” Laser asked tentatively. It was well into the middle of the night, and hadn’t seen her in a few hours.

“Not me. Sly.”

His surprise must have been evident on his face. Liura chuckled softly. “We watch each other’s nightmares. Clip sleeps best of us all. Sly relives it mostly in anniversaries. But lately I don’t sleep. Oh, it’s all right—” she hurried to reassure him as Laser shot her a worried look “—it’ll pass. Just a few days that I can get by on two hours at most. I’ve had more of those lately.”

“Restless, then?”

Liura drew her palms up and down her arms, fighting the feeling of creeping all over her skin. “Very. It’s like fine shaking.”

“Anything you can do about it?” He remembered those nights, when meditation didn’t do a damn thing to settle his General, and she whiled away more than half the night cycle picking apart reports from all ends of the front. It rarely put her in a foul mood, but exhaustion eventually caught up with a vengeance. Liura preferred to avoid collapse, but for all that she appreciated alcohol, much like Slice, she didn’t tolerate it well. And she wasn’t one to go down to the medbay for a sedative.

Liura shook her head slowly. “The best I can hope for at the moment is a tabac stick, but I’m not particularly keen on it. This planet once boasted a private laboratory that I built, staffed, and funded. Safe and effective medications at an affordable price, smuggled in by local Hutt trade route. It’s taken longer than I would have liked to bring it back to an operational state. Sad, really: this is one thing I would have liked to see still standing without my help. But I’m glad the Empire never found them, all their raids be damned.”

Laser couldn’t help a slight smile. “How many of these labs have you set up?”

“Couple. Some ship-building and restoring shops here and there—those tend to do best on scavenger planets. It used to be good for local economy, but the Empire left most worlds with no economy to speak of. Although now it turns out my hazard pay can go a long way.”

She sat playing with the grass gently, stroking the blades with one crooked finger. Laser absently ran his fingers through Flare’s grizzled hair, smiling at his soft whimper. Flare pressed his face against his leg, murmuring happily.

With a sudden ache in his chest, Laser remembered why he hadn’t left with Raptor and Slice the first chance they got. “What happened to him?”

Liura said nothing at first, but left off stroking the grass and looked up at the night sky. “Sometimes it’s a really bad thing, when someone notices you’re good at your job. In the Empire that’s nearly all the time.”

Laser nodded. “Inquisitor?”

The General’s expression soured. “Worse. The sort of scum that doesn’t need a guard, that’s willing to sacrifice its best man for the sake of toying with its prey. They saw a clone and a former High General. They saw Attachment. They used it.”

Sly had mentioned only briefly what Liura had lived through in the last two years, but the message was clear enough. Laser felt his stomach twist. “Did you kill them?”

Liura turned to him with a toothy grin and a cold glint in her eye. “Worse.”

“Oh?”

“Gave her permanent brain damage and live internment in a fucking wall.” Now that was the General he remembered: protective and uncompromising, and satisfyingly bloodthirsty.

“I want specifics, but I also really don’t,” Laser admitted.

“No, you really don’t,” Liura agreed.

He reached across to grasp her hand tightly. “General. Thank you, for him and—for me.”

Liura watched him with an inscrutable expression for a long moment before answering, giving him that Jedi Look again that seemed to bare one’s soul. “So many people owe you thanks, Laser. All the people you helped leave the Empire, brothers and volunteers. I owe you my life twice over for not shooting me, and I owe my life again to Flare for—well. The point is, I would have done anything to bring you back.”

“So I shouldn’t be thanking you?” Laser shook his head. “Most Jedi would have killed us on sight. You’re forgetting that.”

Her face fell. “Yes. Well, I won’t be forgetting it, should we come across a Jedi who dares raise a hand in your direction.”

“You already proved that once, General. No need to risk your life doing it again,” Laser scowled.

“That was a long time ago. I was younger, it was ill-advised, and he was once my friend. I hadn’t realised people could get dumber with age. And anyway, I promised you I wasn’t going anywhere. Next time I’ll just cheat.”

That, at least, got a laugh out of him. And woke Flare—but it was getting cold anyway.


End file.
